by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO's
"Boardwalk Empire". First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot
would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for
as good as the first season turns out to be, it's based almost entirely on the
strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even
the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van
Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise
is tired, too, as almost a century's remove from the 1920s American gangster
cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless
shopkeeper. There's not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of
gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham,
late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly
because if you're a student of gangland history, you're immediately cued to
their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real
revelations of "Boardwalk Empire" are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy
and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz's
haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity
and intelligence. It's enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose--a strange liability, I know.

Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) is treasurer and king scumbag of Atlantic City, running the Boardwalk with his brother Eli (Shea Whigham),
sheriff of Atlantic County, and welcoming Prohibition as a bootleg and smuggling opportunity when, in the series premiere, it rolls in with the New
Year. Nucky takes on a mistress, Lucy (Paz de la Huerta); a ward, Jimmy
(Michael Pitt); and a project in abused Irish immigrant Margaret (Kelly
Macdonald), who may or may not be the saviour of Nucky's soul. Yeah, it's that
kind of show. The real problem with "Boardwalk Empire"--maybe the
only problem--is that it's smart enough to kill off characters the instant they've fulfilled their arc but not smart
enough to evolve them beyond their arcs. Consider the
transformation of "Deadwood"'s characters from Al on down to Wu;
remember that scene where Doherty kills a man, then sits on his bed and cries?
There aren't any such transcendent moments in "Boardwalk Empire", in
other words. It wouldn't be a problem, except that the talent assembled is capable of better. What if, for example, Agent Nelson wasn't a closet
freak trapped in a loveless marriage and tempted by Nucky's hedonism? What if
Jimmy weren't a kid from a broken family who left his heart and mind on a battlefield somewhere?

In their way, these characters are as bound by
convention as Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Johnny Torrio (Greg Antonacci).
Even without the example of "Deadwood", all "Boardwalk
Empire" manages is to be unsurprising in the shadow of Scorsese's
and Coppola's mob epics. Its attempt to find newness in Atlantic City
feels hollow in the wake of James Ellroy's L.A. quartet; it's all done really
well, make no mistake, yet it's all been done before. A trilogy of
episodes--the pilot, its immediate follow-up, and the season finale--written by
creator Terence Winter, former executive producer of "The Sopranos",
demonstrates the potential of the series, beginning in optimism and ending on
the verge of collapse as Nucky's golden touch starts to lose its lustre. The Scorsese-helmed premiere, in fact, is maybe the most
vibrant thing he's done since Casino--and I say this as a fan of The Departed and
The Aviator. It's alive and excited, Scorsese's patented tracking shots
employed to capture end-of-the-world delirium. Hard to explain, but
it reminded me of a Clive Barker short story called "Sex, Death, and
Starshine," maybe Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as the clock
counts down to Prohibition and, in the same conversation, the rise of
women's suffrage. There's an ambiguity in the first two instalments about the
emasculation that is the response to the barely-contained anarchy of the Jazz
Age, the price of cheap hooch and easy women serving as the veneer of
civilization. It suggests that "Boardwalk Empire" is going to be
about lies and pretending. A noble pursuit--but the fear is that that's
all it's about.

Episode 3 is where Agent Nelson ripens into the psychopath Shannon's casting has promised, a holy roller of the sort who,
yeah, mortifies his flesh to a photo of Margaret. We get a hint of his godly
wrath when he interrogates a near-dead prisoner, the lone survivor of an ambush
staged by Jimmy and Capone. It's shocking, but not surprising. It also shows how
Elias is a murderer, too, one less driven by ideology than by loyalty to his
brother, implying that "Boardwalk Empire" is going to draw that
line as well. In the middle is Jimmy, whose loyalties seem divided between Nucky
(i.e., monetary gain and power that he sees available to him as the smartest
person in the room), who once took him under his wing and has again, and the
well-being of his young family, wife Angela (Aleksa Palladino) and young son
Tommy, who greet Jimmy's return like he's Martin Guerre. Pitt's a fine young actor
(he's chosen a difficult path when an easier one was available to him), and
though he's playing that old saw of a damaged vet with a dark past, he approaches it
with understatement. He's River Phoenix without the nervous energy, and while he's
perfect in this role, without having seen the second season I can tell
you I'm a little surprised he was allowed to survive this one. His character
has a clear arc: There will be a point at which he's punished for his role as
audience surrogate and moral barometer--there's a price for the cathartic
nature of his explosions. The righteousness of his violence signs his
inevitable death warrant, and if "Boardwalk Empire" doesn't kill him
off, it will, given the show's relative lack of imagination, make him boring and
protracted. He's a plant in a pot too small for him; it's a peculiar death
sentence.

Episode 3 is likewise where the series
introduces a racial element in black gangster Chalky ("The Wire"'s Michael Kenneth Williams,
just awesome) that will be paid off in the most mundane, proselytizing way in
an unfortunate sequence with the Klan. Elias arrests the supremacist, then
turns the other cheek as Chalky has his way with him. I've seen this scene a few
dozen times and I always like it, but liking it doesn't mean I'm
edified by it. Episode 4 introduces an element of "Mad Men"
misogyny that, yeah, isn't shocking, and ends with Jimmy's stripper mother, Gillian (Mol), seducing Lucky
Luciano in what's probably the most interesting development in this batch of
episodes. She's fascinating, Gillian: She has a weird, Oedipal
thing going on with Jimmy that's played out with her baby-gangster
boyfriend, and she's at the centre of a couple of reversals of the type you
wish were also afforded Jimmy and, especially, Nucky. Nucky's infant son and
wife have died, see, making him that character, taking a shortcut to
depth instead of allowing him to manufacture much on his own. Episode 5 doesn't
go anywhere except to launch Jimmy's whore mistress Pearl (Emily Meade), who
has a very, very limited function and will be replaced with another
disfigured soul in the same way Gillian has replaced Jimmy with Lucky. Episode 6, to its credit, has a wonderful moment where a stodgy old
sufferance biddy gives Margaret the advice that life as a kept woman is
actually not too terrible a gig, considering the state of the world during the Roaring
Twenties.

Episode 7 soars on the back of Richard Harrow, a sniper
missing half his face and given to wearing one of those awesome prosthetic masks you might be able to buy at an Oddities curio shop. He's an amazing
creation--lonely, devoted, probably insane, and eloquently representative of the dislocation and isolation of the Great War generation. Meanwhile, Nucky
is revealed to have father issues, which doesn't do anything to enrich him. It's worth mentioning that what "Boardwalk
Empire" misses is a good ear, the instinct that somebody like Harrow
is more compelling than all that stuff about Jimmy's estranged wife experimenting
with the Anaïs Nin bohemian lifestyle. In evoking an age, it aspires to
Fitzgerald sometimes, Henry Miller at others, but in every moment of its sketching it finds itself
wanting. It doesn't plow enough new roads and is already melting in the rearview into every other work that did it more memorably. The only afterimages
are Harrow and Gillian--the Art in all that Deco.

Episodes 8 and 9 grow Margaret's involvement in
Nucky's affairs while offering more of the same rote development for Jimmy
(sticking up for Richard with Nucky, natch), while Agent Nelson is so crazy by
this point that his role as mirror darkly isn't particularly effective. If
"Boardwalk Empire" wants to destabilize the institutions of government,
church, police, et al, it's only about sixty or seventy years behind the curve. Agent Nelson disrupts a river baptism in the type of scene that will never be pure
again after O Brother Where Art Thou?; Agent Nelson goes rogue on a
partner; Agent Nelson sleeps with a whore and the whore gets...pregnant?
While his wife's at home, barren? C'mon, "Boardwalk Empire". Jesus. The tenth episode ups the ante on the gangster stuff, leading to the inevitable scene where Jimmy and Capone piss off a lot of people and find themselves at odds
with Nucky and Torrio, although there's an
absolutely classic bit with Harrow where he watches Margaret read Road to Oz
and forgives the world for seeing him as a monster. There's political manoeuvring in Episode 11 and a
schism between brothers that sets up various other schisms in the series'
storylines, ramping up to the cliffhanger. It feels like--no, it is--a series blowing its wad without assurance of another round to lend it some
balance and moderation in execution. It's impatient and aware, I
think, of its status as not only a full step below "Deadwood" (what
isn't?), but also a step behind "The Sopranos", a couple seasons of
"Big Love", and the last ten minutes, at least, of "Six Feet
Under". It's hamstrung by its expectations, crippled by its talent,
and at the end undone by the burden of not being a work of genius and asked to
follow several. "Boardwalk Empire" could've been a
contender, but without a lot of pushing, without a braver showrunner and writers, it stands a good chance of being just another well-appointed soap
opera.

THE BLU-RAY DISCHBO shepherds the digitally-shot first season
of "Boardwalk Empire" to Blu-ray in a 1.78:1, 1080p presentation that is
sumptuous and...gilded. It's beautiful. Colours are rich and blacks are
pitch, aspiring to Gordon Willis if not quite getting there in a manner befitting the show's other Icarean shots and falls. Detail is softish
but impressive; more often than not, the high-end HD image looks deceptively filmlike. Better still is the accompanying 5.1 DTS-HD 5.1 MA track, which strikes the perfect
balance of bombastic and subtle. Cue up the forest ambush for a dizzying display of woodsy ambience, idling engines, and spat-a-tat Tommy
guns. Like Leo before it, the mix is an artist with a Thompson.

An intimidating payload of special features augments this handsome set,
starting with an "enhanced" option that activates a
picture-in-picture function for each of the season's 12 episodes. Enabling this brings up a "charm bracelet" timeline along the bottom of
the screen that announces the automatic cueing of behind-the-scenes
featurettes. First up are Winter and Emmy-winner
Scorsese to talk about their involvement; subsequent contributions from the two (and all the participants, from costumed cast members to select crew) were evidently sourced from one long interview, but
they're inserted with wisdom. Other pop-ups include historical tidbits, plus remarks from actual historians. It most resembles the still-unequalled history lesson/commentary track from New Line's masterful
Ifinifilm DVD of Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days--and just as that film
is not as good without it, "Boardwalk Empire" is bolstered
immeasurably by it. Selecting the PIP with the attendant commentary tracks is...what can I
say? It's worth the price of admission. I should backtrack and say
that I love the menu layout and cross-editing that occurs beneath it, mostly
because it reminds me of "BioShock". What I loved was Winter, via the PiP, guiding the viewer through not merely the production process, but also the logic guiding how the scope of the show changed as the
series evolved. Less good is Winter's "Pilot" commentary (where's
Marty?), which is, if not redundant, mainly interested in exposition
separated by silences.

Staying with Disc One, a text-only
"Character Dossier" is exactly what it sounds like, albeit much bigger
than you'd think. Episode 1.4, "Anastasia," sports another commentary,
this time with Winter, Buscemi, and Williams. Winter dominates the
track, but is certainly more interesting this time around in his encyclopaedic
knowledge of actual historic locations and obvious affection for his
co-commentators. The two actors, for their part, deliver more bonhomie than insight--although
Buscemi, with his background behind the camera, is able to point out a few grace moments. The commentary for 1.6, "Family Limitation,"
has director Tim Van Patten and writer Howard Korder offering up several
interesting factoids, such as the revelation that Pitt practised--and
executed--his own Five Finger Filet moment. There are details in here I didn't
know I was interested to know ("That's a reproduction"), and the two
are congenial and informative. Winter returns with director Brian Kirk for
"Hold Me In Paradise" (1.8), having relaxed into his
role as raconteur. A nice listen again made
essential by the PiP feature. I feel like I know more about Prohibition-era
Atlantic City now than I ever needed to.

A couple of documentaries supplement Disc Four. "Atlantic City: The Original Sin
City" (30 mins., HD) gathers together technical consultant Ed McGinty along with
several other historians and, yeah!, librarians to discuss the
founding of Atlantic City in a creation story (let's not forget Nelson Johnson
who wrote the history upon which the show is based) that sounds an awful lot
like the building of the White House. Seriously. Anyway, it's exhaustive and
detailed and definitely worth the watch. A "Speakeasy Tour" (25
mins., HD)--produced for HBO as a promo item, it appears--is exactly what it
sounds like, with Antonocci hosting historic speakeasies in the major cities supplied
through the Boardwalk. More history, and pleasant. The last two episodes,
"Paris Green" (1.11) and "A Return to Normalcy" (1.12),
sport similarly pleasant, informed yakkers, the first with
Korder, director Allen Coulter, and a predictably quiet Michael Shannon, who
seems like a nice guy though has,
I fear, already been typecast for the rest of his career. The other pairs
Winter with Van Patten.

The fifth and final disc contains a brief
"Making of" (20 mins., HD) culled from the same sessions that supplied the PiP feature, meaning it doesn't have a whole lot of substance but isn't a total
waste. Last and certainly least, "Creating the Boardwalk" (5
mins., HD) is possibly the only superfluous extra in the entire package. Bundled with the BDs are Digital Copies of the whole shebang on two DVDs.